Читать книгу Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter in the ‘Gilded Age’ - Amanda Stuart Mackenzie - Страница 10

IN SPITE OF Murray Smith’s failing health, the family rallied to give its saviour a smart wedding. Some press reports suggest that Murray Smith felt well enough to give his daughter away in marriage, but Alva was adamant in her memoirs that he was too ill to attend, telling Sara Bard Field: ‘When I was all dressed up for the ceremony and about to leave the house he kissed me with great tenderness and told me I was taking a great burden off his mind and that he knew that if anything happened to him I would look after the rest of the family.’¹ This notion that she had rescued the Smiths – and had done as well as any absent son – was important to Alva’s view of herself in later life, allowing her to think of herself as a heroine rather than a gold-digger. In a letter to her lover, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Sara Bard Field remarked that Alva’s ‘terrible marriage to Mr Vanderbilt with its sordid selling of her unloving self but with the truly noble desire to save her Father’ was much like life itself: ‘a pathetic mixture of good and bad’.²

Whatever her reasons for marrying William K. Vanderbilt, Alva went to some lengths to ensure that her wedding on 20 April 1875 was impressively exclusive. It was reported as ‘the grandest wedding witnessed in this city for many years’,³ and even in old age she was anxious to stress that Calvary Church was the most fashionable church in New York and that Dr Washburn who conducted the marriage service was the most fashionable divine. Her bridesmaids included Consuelo Yznaga and Edith Cooper, but Minnie Stevens was too ill to attend and had to be replaced at the last minute by Natica Yznaga. Alva’s wedding dress from Paris failed to arrive in time (or so she said) and another was run up by Madame Donovan of New York using Phoebe’s antique lace flounces. The New York Times remarked that the wedding guests included ‘hundreds’ of the ‘wealth and fashion of the city’,⁴ although most of those it listed were in-laws to the Vanderbilts. Four policemen had to escort the bride through crowds from her carriage. Significantly, Alva was the first bride in New York to issue cards of admission to her wedding guests, a move guaranteed to bring crowds of the excluded flocking to the church door.

The account of her wedding that Alva dictated to her secretary, Mary Young, after 1928 suggests that she grasped early the Faustian bargain emerging between publicity and social success in Gilded Age New York – a development deplored by Henry James a decade later. ‘One sketches one’s age but imperfectly if one doesn’t touch on that particular matter: the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private. It is the highest expression of the note of “familiarity”, the sinking of manners, in so many ways, which the democratisation of the world brings with it,’⁵ he expostulated in 1887.

In a democratised world with few other navigational aids, visibility was rapidly becoming the key to social success and it was largely in the gift of newspapers (now becoming big businesses in their own right), and later assisted by the invention of photography. Almost everyone with social ambitions had to come to terms with this. Alva and William K. were part of a younger group. They were already much less inhibited about using publicity as a weapon than their elders, though even they would find it difficult to manipulate by the 1890s. ‘Unable to control the press, and unwilling to consider life without heightened visibility, the late nineteenth-century aristocrats were America’s first celebrity-martyrs,’⁶ writes Eric Homberger. If heiresses such as Gertrude Vanderbilt and Consuelo later complained that they hated being watched, they had good reason to blame their parents’ generation for seeking out publicity twenty years earlier.

Two weeks after her wedding in 1875, however, Alva had to attend to sadder matters than publicity, for her father finally died. His daughter’s change in circumstances had come too late to help him. ‘Had he died sooner, the whole course of my life might have been other than it was. But who is there living who cannot say that of some event in his or her life?,’⁷ Alva remarked to Sara Bard Field. After Murray Smith’s death she was shown great kindness by William Henry Vanderbilt who told Alva that he regarded her as a daughter and that she should turn to him for whatever she needed. The affection was mutual for Alva always held him in great regard. This relationship was not the problem however. Even after marriage, Alva continued to experience the effect that the power of money has on the powerless as she watched her in-laws tiptoe round the ageing Commodore. Though she always maintained fiercely that she was not overawed by him, Alva also took great care to avoid giving offence, for no-one knew how his fortune stood, nor what he proposed to do with it after his death.

Fortunately, the Commodore took to his pugnacious new granddaughter-in-law from the outset, perhaps divining qualities which were less apparent in his handsome grandson. When she expressed a fondness for country life, he shocked everyone by giving her the use of his old family home on Staten Island. ‘Much to his surprise, and I believe also his interest and gratification, I took him at his word … I renovated the old house, which had been his home many years before, and went there one July intending to remain perhaps through August.’⁸ The visit was an unqualified disaster and soon ‘between mosquitoes, and chills and fever, I had quite enough of it’. The Commodore remained happily unaware of this. ‘I never told the Commodore, leaving him under the impression that I stayed there longer than was really the case. It pleased him, and that was all that mattered.’ For his part William K. also netted a significant success after becoming engaged to Alva: his name appeared as one of the sponsors of a bouncer’s ball, marking the first appearance of the Vanderbilt name in a social column.⁹

After the wedding in 1875, there was a period of mourning for Alva’s father. Mr and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt concentrated on settling in to their new brownstone house on West 44th Street and avoided taking any action that might unsettle the Head of the House of Vanderbilt. Alva could at least console herself with the knowledge that she had a fashionable home, a secure income, an amiable and handsome husband whose social standing was improving, warm relations with his rich family and excellent expectations. Compared to at least two of her closest friends, her position was enviable. In spite of her success with the Prince of Wales and her reputation as an heiress, Minnie Stevens stayed on the marriage market until 1878 by which time she had suffered considerable public humiliation. After the death of Mr Paran Stevens, his wife and Minnie spent much time in Europe on the look-out for an aristocratic husband. The Duc de Guiche proposed to her but broke off the engagement when the Duc de Gramont had a man go through her affairs who discovered that she was not worth as much as anyone had imagined. Lady Waldegrave, one of Miss Stevens’ sponsors in London society, wrote to Lady Strachey: ‘I must say I think this business very cruel, but at the same time I can’t help thinking she deserved a snubbing as she told me she had £20,000 a year and would have more and she told me that sum in dollars as well, so there is no mistaking the amount.’ Minnie Stevens finally married the titleless Arthur Paget in 1878, at the age of twenty-five (though the story could be said to have one kind of happy ending for he eventually became a baronet, and she became Lady Paget).

Alva’s oldest female friend, Consuelo Yznaga, meanwhile, caused a social sensation the year after the Vanderbilts’ wedding by marrying Viscount Mandeville, heir to the 7th Duke of Manchester. Like Alva, Consuelo Yznaga brought very little money to the marriage, a disadvantage compounded by a growing family reputation for eccentricity, though it must be said that the bar for eccentricity was set low in late-nineteenth-century New York. Consuelo Yznaga’s brother Fernando was later divorced by Alva’s sister Jenny, ‘because he never wore socks’;¹⁰ Consuelo Yznaga herself became famous for whipping out a banjo in London drawing rooms and playing popular songs to the assembled company. Viscount Mandeville’s parents were deeply dismayed by the engagement because of his fiancée’s inadequate dowry, but in the longer term it was their son who proved to be the libertine. In spite of a magnificent wedding in Grace Church attended by 1,400 guests, it was not long before the gossip columns were talking openly of the manner in which the Viscount was putting the Atlantic between a music-hall singer and his wife: and when he died young, in 1892, it was said of his widow that she had spent much of her married life as ‘the pet of the spare bedrooms’.¹¹

Later, Edith Wharton would use Consuelo Yznaga as the model for an unhappy, indebted, adulteress in The Buccaneers. In 1876, however, her transformation into Viscountess Mandeville looked like a pace-setting coup. It may have unsettled Alva and it certainly seems to have implanted an idea. Alva had already turned her attention to starting a family, becoming pregnant in June 1876. The William K. Vanderbilts’ first child, a daughter, was born on 2 March 1877. The baby was immediately named Consuelo after her godmother, the only duchess-in-waiting that either of the Vanderbilts knew.

About the same time as Alva became pregnant with Consuelo, the Commodore was diagnosed with cancer. His strong constitution made death protracted. A miasma of disinformation floated over his deathbed as competitors circulated tales of his demise to undermine the Vanderbilt stocks. He is said to have thrown hot-water bottles at his doctors and yelled imprecations at waiting journalists, though his wife was encouraged that he simply paid off a noisy organ grinder beneath his window rather than threaten to shoot him.¹² The Commodore finally died on 4 January 1877, surrounded by large numbers of his family. It was claimed that he had enjoyed singing hymns on his deathbed, although the Reverend Henry Beecher spoilt the party by adding sourly: ‘I am glad he liked the hymns, but if he had sung them thirty years ago it would have made a great difference.’¹³

The Commodore’s obituary in The New York Times ran to several pages, and the flags in New York flew at half-mast. He was buried in a simple ceremony at the Moravian Cemetery at New Dorp. In one sense, the Commodore’s story had come full circle – the farm boy from Staten Island returning to be buried as a titan of industry. In another sense, however, the arrangements the Commodore made for his fortune demonstrated his absolute determination that the history of the earlier Staten Island Vanderbilts should never be repeated.

When it was published, the Vanderbilt will caused uproar. The Commodore had left an astonishing $100 million^*, making him the wealthiest man in America, twice as rich as John Jacob Astor and the department store owner Alexander T. Stewart. Even more surprising, however, was the manner in which he had bequeathed his fortune. Almost $90 million went to William Henry to keep the New York Central Railroad intact, suggesting that when the Commodore had said ‘If you give away the surplus you give away the control,’¹⁴ he meant it. A further $10 million was divided between William Henry’s four sons, with the greater share assigned to two of them already working in the family enterprise – Cornelius II and William K. Even in death, the Commodore had flown in the face of convention. He had, in effect, transferred to the English system of primogeniture from the European principle of equal inheritance, setting up a Vanderbilt dynasty which would descend through William Henry, and, in the words of Louis Auchincloss, consigned the rest of his children and their descendants to life as ‘nonkosher Vanderbilts’. When William Henry heard the news, he is said to have put down his head on the piano and wept.

There were few sounds of weeping from William K. and Alva, however. Their cautious strategy had paid off. William K.’s charm and application on behalf of the family enterprise (and possibly the Commodore’s affection for Alva) netted him $3 million – without the responsibilities laid upon his elder brother Cornelius II. The industrious and conscientious Cornelius received a larger bequest totalling $5.5 million, but this signalled his position as head of the family designate and a clear understanding that he would eventually take charge of the business. Others of whom the Commodore approved also fared well, including William Henry’s younger sons, Fred and George, while his widow had already agreed to $500,000 and the house in Washington Square as her dower settlement. The rest of the family were less than delighted. The Commodore’s eight daughters were left $2.45 million between them, split unevenly and depending, it would seem, on relative degrees of spite towards his second wife. The unfortunate Cornelius Jeremiah was only awarded $200,000 in trust.

Just when William K. and Alva felt financially secure enough to launch themselves at the very pinnacle of New York society, Cornelius Jeremiah and two of his sisters determined to sue. This was a major setback. The will case dragged through the courts for months until March 1879. Allegations flew backwards and forwards of the Commodore’s profanity, his aggression, his association with spiritualists and ‘healing hands’, and his cruelty to his afflicted son. Much to the disappointment of the press, the Claflin sisters did not produce the embarrassing testimony that was anticipated (possibly because William Henry paid them off) but the public was once again reminded of a most unfortunate association. It was alleged that the Commodore suffered from a form of mania when it came to money and his ‘virility’ was adduced to support this. In turn, the defence made much of Cornelius Jeremiah’s drunkenness, gambling and indebtedness. Most of these arguments were rejected by the judge, and the trial was suddenly settled in 1879 when William Henry volunteered to hand over some of his fortune to his sisters. Nonetheless, the feud was never patched up and it is small wonder that in 1878, Mrs Astor still felt compelled to hold the line when it came to admitting Vanderbilts to her famous ballroom.

Although the trial was acutely embarrassing, William K.’s legacy of $3 million was not included in the contested part of the will. He and Alva continued to keep a modest profile as they set about their first important building project, a house on Long Island. If Alva’s imagination had been ignited by French culture as a teenager, the model that entranced William K. was that of the English sporting gentleman with a house in the country. He was not alone. ‘Wealthy Americans learned to drive fancy coaches, play polo, hunt with hounds, breed racehorses and pedigree livestock and took up yachting …,’ writes Eric Homberger. ‘They collected Old Masters, oriental carpets, heirloom silver, and precious jewels. Americans began to describe themselves as “sportsmen”. English taste and style, suggesting refinement, social position, and wealth were professedly aristocratic in the eyes of New Yorkers. They still are.’¹⁵

Soon after the death of the Commodore in 1877, William K. bought 900 acres of land near Islip on Long Island and asked the architect Richard Morris Hunt to build him a sporting retreat. Alva’s vehement determination to control the story of her first marriage has disguised the fact that in their early years of wedlock, William K. was just as set on aristocratisation as his wife. At this stage, indeed, he led the way. The arrival of the railroad to Islip in the 1870s put an abundant supply of game within easy reach of New York; and it helped that Islip was secluded – the more the lives of the social elite were observed by the press, the more important privacy became. More significantly, however, the spot William K. selected for his country house was conveniently close to the first exclusive gentlemen’s club that invited him to become a member, the South Side Club near Islip which he joined the year after his marriage in 1876. The South Side was a sporting club where pedigree and social connections mattered less than whether a chap was a good shot with pleasant sporting manners, making William K. a perfect candidate.¹⁶

The house, which was ready for occupancy in 1879 when Consuelo was two, was designed by Hunt in the fashionable ‘Stick Style’, an all-wood version of the English mock-Tudor method of half-timbering. Unlike the houses of England’s landed aristocracy, however, it was conceived from the outset as a retreat from city life. The name it was given, ‘Idle Hour’, suggested a place of leisure, decided (it was said) on the toss of a coin with Mr Schuyler Parsons on the porch of the South Side Club, who then had to make do with ‘Whileaway’ for his own establishment nearby.¹⁷

Idle Hour cost the Vanderbilts a mere $150,000 out of the $3 million they had inherited. Throughout the 1880s they developed it to a point where the estate was almost entirely self-sufficient. Eventually Idle Hour had amenities of which most English aristocrats, sporting or otherwise, could only dream, including an icehouse, a laundry, a water tower, a house for the superintendent, a house for the palm trees and a teahouse by the bay. Idle Hour played an important role in securing William K.’s membership of other smart clubs. Although he joined the Union Club in 1877, the most exclusive of them all – the Coaching Club – only capitulated after he invited all its members to stay at Idle Hour in 1883.¹⁸ The building of Idle Hour was just as significant for Alva for quite a different reason: it brought her into contact with its architect Richard Morris Hunt. In Alva, Hunt found a visionary client in sympathy with his ideas; she encouraged daring and innovation, allowing him to find new levels of creativity and audacity that would make him the leading architect of the Gilded Age. For her part, Alva suddenly found a way of expressing herself.

In another world, at another time, it is perfectly possible that Alva might have been an architect. Some of those who knew her best, including Consuelo, thought she was always at her happiest when she was designing houses and rearranging landscapes. This was one of life’s theatres where she ceased to be a spectator and became a paid-up member of the cast. When it came to designing Vanderbilt houses, she considered every detail and it seemed to calm her down. Hunt understood this instinctively. He described her as a ‘wonder’ to his wife, and gave Alva the use of a draughtsman in his office to help her work out her ideas. ‘I spent many delightful hours in his office, working with the draughtsmen he placed at my disposal, always encouraged by him, and inspired alike by his kindness and great genius. He was my instructor and dear friend for many years, and the work we did together was for me always an endless delight, and a great resource.’¹⁹ This is not to say they did not fight, but when they did they were well matched. ‘Mr Hunt had a fiery temper … my own was not mild. We often had terrific word battles. With fiery intensity he would insist on certain things. I would, with equal eagerness, insist on the contrary. Once during the planning of this house we had had a long and heated argument over some detail of measurement. Finally he turned to me in rage and said “Damn it Mrs Vanderbilt who is building this house?” and I answered “Damn it, Mr Hunt, who is going to live in [it]?”’²⁰

Richard Morris Hunt has the distinction of being one of the very few men Alva ever really loved, although there is no suggestion that the relationship was anything other than platonic and plenty to demonstrate that she was a rigorously demanding client. She called it one of the great companionships of her life. It gave her scope to fulfil a long-held ambition – to change the way New York looked, and to turn it, as far as possible, back into France. The prevailing architectural fashion was the brownstone house, symptomatic, in Alva’s later professed view, ‘of the lightly veneered crudeness of America’. When Alva and Richard Morris Hunt first met there was a meeting of minds on this issue: ‘I told him how my taste trained in the European capitals had been shocked with what seemed to be a conspiracy of bad taste in American architecture and how willing and eager I was to break away from all precident [sic] and under his guidance build a thing of beauty … [I] determined that if ever the time came when I built a house I would profit by my contact with the architectural beauties of the Old World …’²¹.

Richard Morris Hunt had found a kindred spirit. Although a generation older, he had spent nearly nine years studying in Paris. Like Alva, he was captivated by French art and architecture in his youth, and came to speak French so fluently that he was sometimes mistaken for a Frenchman. Moreover, he studied architecture with Hector-Martin Lefuel, official architect to the Second Empire which had so entranced Alva. Lefuel encouraged Hunt to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, making him the first and only American architect of his generation to be trained there. Alva and Richard Morris Hunt were not, of course, the only people in New York who were fascinated by the opulent world of Second Empire France but between them they pioneered something new: the introduction of beaux-arts architecture to New York, a style that would define the Gilded Age and dominate the city’s architecture until the First World War.

The core idea at the heart of the beaux-arts was the conviction that the architectural ideal was classical, embracing not just Greek and Roman architecture but the French and Italian Renaissance as well. However, beaux-arts theory also looked to the future with state-of-the-art construction techniques, using modern materials such as plate glass and iron.²² Indeed the great beaux-arts buildings of New York were only possible thanks to the more remarkable inventions of the industrial revolution, such as the elevator and electric lighting, which allowed corporations to construct great edifices for large numbers of workers. One characteristic of these buildings was the way they dramatised space. According to the architectural historians Foreman and Stimson: ‘Good beaux-arts buildings have a very calculated dramatic effect … Facades and entries were held to be crucial in establishing important initial reactions to the building’s use and importance.’²³ In public beaux-arts buildings such as the New York Public Library the effect was democratic – anyone gliding down its great main staircase could feel stately. Applied to domestic architecture, however, the beaux-arts philosophy had quite the opposite effect. The style provided sweeping backdrops for America’s new aristocrats in much the same way that Versailles dramatised the ancien régime. Alva would have agreed with Henry James that the secret of its appeal lay in a ‘particular type of dauntless power’.²⁴

The first beaux-arts collaboration between Alva and Richard Morris Hunt was a house in New York to replace the brownstone house on West 44th Street that she secretly greatly disliked. The design of the new house was undeniably the outward expression of social ambition. Alva was, in effect, pioneering vertically rather than horizontally, creating a space that the aristocrats of New York would find irresistible. However, 660 Fifth Avenue can also be understood as the first great example of Hunt and Alva’s shared vision – a house designed to show American aristocracy what could be done if the great architecture of the European past was combined with the American gift for the modern in America’s own ‘Renaissance’. Alva’s vision for the Vanderbilts went even further, for she felt the family should act like Renaissance merchant princes and become great patrons of the arts. The Medicis of Florence had built houses that were not merely beautiful private residences but an outward expression of the importance of the family. They had ‘represented not only wealth but knowledge and culture, desirable elements for wealth to encourage …’ If the Medicis could do it, so could the Vanderbilts. ‘I preached this doctrine at home and to William H. Vanderbilt’ she wrote later.²⁵

Persuading her father-in-law, William Henry Vanderbilt, to behave like a Medici, turned out to be surprisingly easy. Liberated from both the Commodore and the will case after 1879, he went into action in an uninhibited manner which astounded New York society, only just coming to terms with his transformation from Staten Island farmer to railroad tycoon. He needed little persuasion that the Vanderbilts should build houses that reflected the family’s wealth, and encouraged his elder son, Cornelius II, to follow suit. The settlement of the will case had the effect of a starting pistol: William H., Cornelius II and William K. all filed plans for houses along Fifth Avenue on the same day. Fifth Avenue north of 50th Street was at that time unfashionable, but by the 1880s the area would be known as ‘Vanderbilt Alley’, setting a tone for sumptuous development in New York for the rest of the century.

660 Fifth Avenue was not the largest of the three houses (the others were at 640 and 1 West 57th Street) but it was certainly the most audacious. Alva drew gasps from her in-laws when she presented her plans to them in 1879:

I knew that they were more elaborate and would have a somewhat staggering effect on the family group. Nor was I mistaken. When the paper was unrolled and they all saw the pretentious plans of a house which would cover almost a city block there was a unanimous gasp from the assembly. With much elation I carefully explained the drawing, elaborating all the details and enjoying the effect on my audience. After a while my father-in-law said crisply: ‘Well, well, where do you expect to get the money for all this?’ ‘From you’ I answered instantly, giving him an affectionate slap on the back. The rest sat appalled at my temerity. To them it was like being families with Established Power. My father-in-law laughed and the money for the house came.²⁶

660 Fifth Avenue, designed by Richard Morris Hunt for Alva and William K., would become a New York landmark for decades. Based on the sixteenth-century chateau of Blois on the Loire, out of Chenonceau, it also enjoyed fifteenth-century French Gothic accents, and marked a clear turning point for Hunt as he finally slipped his American architectural moorings. Suggesting that Sleeping Beauty’s castle had somehow landed from outer space on Fifth Avenue, its dominant feature was a three-storey tourelle by the entrance. There were gargoyles, flying buttresses and gables. The designs for this house, a masterpiece of aristocratic image-making, suggested something more complex than straightforward conspicuous consumption, or even aristocratic emulation – though both were an important part of its make-up. The most striking note of all was an unmistakeable flight from reality. In Richard Morris Hunt’s conceptual watercolour for 660 Fifth Avenue, ghostly figures inhabited a fairy-tale palace; drawings for other rooms, such as the Supper Room, were peopled by tiny Renaissance princes.²⁷ In 660 Fifth Avenue, it was as if a deliberate decision had been taken to turn an aristocratic back on the drab, poverty-stricken world a few blocks away – a world into which one could fall so easily without a safety net. This sense of withdrawal to a magical past was a new departure for American architecture; it would make its own contribution to the growing sense of division between rich and poor in New York and it would be copied to the point of pastiche by the early-twentieth century.

Although New York’s architects generally approved of 660 Fifth Avenue, and admired its originality, reaction from New York society was mixed. The pale Indiana limestone of its exterior marked a decisive break with the ugliness of brownstone houses. Every block of limestone was tooled – worked over by a hand chisel. The facades were covered with a riot of rich and decorative carving which caused great consternation: ‘This radical departure from the accepted brown-stone front raised a storm of criticism among my friends,’ wrote Alva. ‘O these whippings from parents and society when the child or adult wishes to be a person and not a member of a mass.’²⁸ (Readers of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence may remember that Catherine Mingott’s decision to build a pale, cream-coloured house also marked her out as a morally courageous eccentric.) While she was away in Europe, Alva received a stream of alarmed letters telling her that carvings ‘of naked boys and girls’ were appearing on the rooftop. ‘They failed to see, as many, fatally tainted by Puritanism still fail to see, the exquisite beauty of the human form and of its significance in connection with the special period we were trying to represent,’²⁹ she commented.

Even to those who could take the psychological strain, the interior was almost overwhelming, dominated by spaces intended to dramatise the authority and economic power of the Vanderbilts. The dining room was 80-feet long, 28-feet wide and 35-feet high, had two colossal Renaissance fireplaces and a stained-glass window depicting a scene from the meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The sweeping grand stairway of Caen stone to the second floor was a tour de force of trophies, fruit, masks and cherubs. The entrance hall measured 60 feet and was lined with carvings and tapestries. The dominant theme may have been illusion and flight from reality but the translation of the remains of France’s ancien régime to this new American interior was real enough. It had all been masterminded by the French firm, Jules Allard et Fils, who would come to specialise in importing architectural salvage, artefacts and paintings directly from the houses of ruined French aristocrats for the houses of plutocratic aristocrats in the United States. The William K. Vanderbilts’ paintings not only included Rembrandt’s ‘Man in Oriental Costume’, and Gainsborough’s ‘Mrs Elliot’, but François Boucher’s spectacular ‘Toilet of Venus’. This came to Alva’s boudoir – indirectly – from the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour; and at least one fine secretaire came from the apartments of Marie Antoinette herself.

As late as 1882, Mrs Astor was still refusing to acknowledge the Vanderbilts formally. Her attitude was increasingly irrational for leaving aside Alva’s claims to southern gentility, Cornelius II had married Alice Claypoole Gwynn in 1867 (whose great-great-grandfather was Abraham Claypoole, a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell), and in 1881 William K.’s sister, Lila, married William Seward Webb, whose grandfather had been an aide to George Washington. Both William Henry and Cornelius II, head of the family elect, were building fine houses and lived lives of unimpeachable luxoriousness. However, Mrs Astor’s strength of feeling on this matter may have been reinforced by two Vanderbilt upsets in the same year. One came about as a result of William Henry Vanderbilt remarking: ‘The public be damned!’ in answer to a reporter’s question about running a Pennsylvania train for the public benefit. Some maintain that William Henry was simply defending the interests of shareholders as he had every right to do, but he was universally excoriated for this jest, and the image of a Vanderbilt as a boorish robber-baron was successfully dangled before the public once again by his opponents. The scandal surrounding the unfortunate Cornelius Jeremiah was worse. After the Commodore’s death he became obsessed with funding his addiction to gambling. In 1882 he shot himself in the Glenham Hotel in New York, leaving debts of over $15,000. An undignified auction of his belongings compounded the disgrace of a family suicide.

Undaunted, Alva and William K. pressed on with their entrée to New York’s social elite. A charming and energetic couple, about to take possession of a huge and dazzling house which would flatter the ambitions and pretensions of New York’s gratin, they were already being asked to the best parties. In spite of family scandals they were invited to a Patriarchs’ ball in 1882 and another early in 1883. As 660 Fifth Avenue neared completion, they started to plan a house-warming party of their own. The Vanderbilt ball, as it came to be known, has gone down in the annals of party history. In deciding to hold it in March 1883, and to send out 1,600 invitations, Alva and William K. must have calculated that to a very great extent, society’s resistance to the Vanderbilts was already collapsing. They knew that the elite of New York was agog with curiosity over 660 Fifth Avenue; they made sure that society understood that the ball would be like no other in terms of expense and display; and Alva shrewdly reduced the social risk to invitees (and herself) by giving the party in honour of her old friend, Consuelo Yznaga, now Viscountess Mandeville, knowing full well that the presence of a real aristocrat would overcome residual hesitation – a manoeuvre she would repeat in the future. This left the problem of Mrs Astor.

The story goes that Alva used the ball to outwit Mrs Astor, who had not, in March 1883, been persuaded to relax her Vanderbilt-denying ordinance. This may have been because of recent scandals; possibly because she still thought the Vanderbilts remained a symbol of the dangers of vulgar wealth; and probably because she had anathematised them in the past and was in no hurry to back down. Her daughter, Carrie, on the other hand, was closer in age to the William K. Vanderbilts and enjoyed parties given by younger ‘swells’. She looked forward to being asked to the Vanderbilts’ house-warming ball, and even started to rehearse quadrilles with her friends. It then transpired that there could be no invitation because, according to the etiquette of the day, Mrs Astor had to call on Mrs Vanderbilt before Alva could invite Miss Carrie Astor to the ball. Such was the distress of Miss Carrie Astor that Mrs Astor’s maternal love overcame her pride. She relented, made the call and an invitation was forthcoming.

This story has long been called into question. There is no doubt that the ball was planned with an element of calculated risk and that Alva wished Mrs Astor to grace it with her presence. There is no doubt that Mrs Astor only called on Alva for the first time shortly before the ball. However, Alva and Mrs Astor sat together on the executive committee of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund,³⁰ and the Vanderbilts had already attended two Patriarchs’ balls, which would have been impossible without Mrs Astor’s implicit approval. It is more than likely that if there had been no ball, Mrs Astor would have called on Alva soon after she moved into her new house – at the moment when, as one wag put it, the Vanderbilts had finished Vanderbuilding. The ball simply acted as a catalyst for Mrs Astor’s public acknowledgement as Alva hoped it might.

Once the invitations had been sent out, it is perfectly possible that Carrie Astor appealed to her mother to speed things up and that Ward McAllister sensed that it would be better for Mrs Astor to acknowledge the Vanderbilts formally if she wished to stay abreast of the Zeitgeist and avoid looking foolish. The story that Alva deliberately outwitted Mrs Astor is too crude, however. In one sense she had done that long before when she started to plan 660 with Richard Morris Hunt. The end result was the same, however. It only took a brief glimpse of the interior of 660 Fifth Avenue to reassure the Queen of Society that Mr and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt were fine upstanding examples of the civilised ‘money power’³¹ which she and Ward McAllister so wished to encourage. ‘We have no right,’ she commented in 1883, ‘to exclude those whom the growth of this great country has brought forward, provided they are not vulgar in speech or appearance. The time has come for the Vanderbilts.’³²

Proust’s remark that parties do not really happen until the day afterwards when the uninvited read about them in the newspapers is only partly true of the Vanderbilt ball. This party was a wild success before it ever took place. Not only did Mrs Astor finally capitulate, but the ball was the principal subject of discussion for weeks beforehand among the prospective guests. It was a fancy-dress ball, of course, in the spirit of make-believe and flight from reality that characterised the house; and the elite of society happily collaborated. ‘Every artist in the city was set to work to design novel costumes – to produce something in the way of a fancy dress that would make its wearer live ever after in history,’³³ wrote Ward McAllister with a characteristic sense of proportion. Alva was deeply gratified by the time and energy expended by hundreds of guests on their outfits, which took weeks of work by New York’s best dressmakers and couturiers. The degree of focus, effort and cost expended could only be seen as a compliment to the new generation of civilised Vanderbilts and marked out their elevation to the apex of society just as clearly as any endorsement from Mrs Astor.

In Alva’s view, the male guests at the ball were, if anything, ‘more brilliantly and perfectly turned out than the women’.³⁴ The invitation certainly sent some of them into a great sartorial tizzy. On the day of the party Ward McAllister was obliged to recruit extra helpers to get him dressed, ‘two sturdy fellows on either side of me holding up a pair of leather trunks, I on a step-ladder, one mass of powder, descending into them, an operation consuming an hour’.³⁵ Another male guest, Augustus Gurney, never managed to resolve his outfit crisis. He went home in the middle of the ball and changed, disappearing as a Moldavian chieftain and re-appearing as a Turkish pasha.

It was, said Alva modestly, ‘the most brilliant ball ever given in New York’.³⁶ It was certainly one of the more surreal. Don Carlos chatted away over supper with Little Bo Peep; Mary Stuart was seen in conversation with Neapolitan fishermen and a Capuchin monk; a plethora of Hungarian hussars mingled with several representatives of the French Bourbons; and the Cornelius Vanderbilts stood for both past and future with Cornelius as Louis XVI and Alice as ‘Electric Light’, in a costume that intermittently lit up, courtesy of batteries secreted in her pockets. Curiously, both Alva and Mrs Astor appeared as Venetian noblewomen, and were seen chatting amiably and publicly on the stairs. Alva’s dress was made of white satin embroidered in gold, with a velvet mantle, and a diadem of diamonds. Many of the costumes, including Lady Mandeville’s as Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, came posthaste from Paris. Perhaps most interesting of all, William K. was dressed as François I in doublet and hose, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the small princely figure whom Richard Morris Hunt once inserted into his earliest designs for the Supper Room.

That evening, the involvement of the guests in the success of the party went further than turning up in elaborate costumes and acknowledging that the Vanderbilts had ‘arrived’. The other huge compliment paid to the hosts was the trouble taken over the quadrilles, which became the high point of the evening. Quadrilles were square dances in five movements which had become elaborate fixtures at society balls, for they were danced in costumes designed round a theme, and took weeks of organisation and rehearsal by teams of guests beforehand. The six quadrilles at the Vanderbilt ball exceeded anything that had ever been seen before, danced by over a hundred of the Vanderbilts’ friends.

According to one authority, ‘the chief attraction was the “hobby horse quadrille,” for which the dancers wore costumes that made them look as if they were mounted on horses. The life-size hobby horses took two months to construct and were covered with genuine leather hides and flowing manes. Tails were attached to the waists of the dancers and false legs placed on the outside of richly embroidered horse blankets, giving the illusion that the dancers were mounted; “the deception”, one observer enthused, “was quite perfect”.’³⁷ Ward McAllister organised the Mother Goose Quadrille himself (another compliment to the hosts) which involved participation from Jack and Jill, Little Red-Riding Hood, Bo-Peep, Goody Two-Shoes, Mary, Mary Quite Contrary, and My Pretty Maid. He was forced to concede, however, that it was the Star Quadrille containing the ‘youth and beauty of the city’ which was the most brilliant, for all the young ladies wore electric lights in their hair which produced ‘a fairy and elf-like appearance to each of them’.³⁸ As Alva put it later, the 1883 Vanderbilt ball ‘marked an epoch in the social history of the city’. As well as consolidating the position of the Vanderbilts, it marked a change of pace in two other ways. Alva, ever mindful of maximum visibility, was the first hostess to allow a full report of the ball to be syndicated to the newspapers through the New York World and to allow reporters to wander through the house earlier in the day. It was one of the World’s earliest society scoops and set a precedent for press coverage of similar events in the following decades. The paper calculated that the ball cost $155,730 for the costumes, $11,000 for the flowers, $65,270 for champagne and music, and $4,000 for hairdressers. This meant that Mrs William K. Vanderbilt had also set a vertiginous new standard for just the kind of social expenditure that had come so close to defeating the Smiths when they returned from France to America.³⁹

When writing her memoirs in later life, Consuelo could recall very little of her early childhood. She remembered nothing of the ugly brownstone building where she was born. No-one registered her birth either, an oversight that subsequently caused a great deal of bureaucratic trouble. She moved into 660 Fifth Avenue with her parents in 1883, just before she was six, so the childhood she recollected began in surroundings of extraordinary affluence. She does not seem to have been present at the 1883 ball (unlike Cousin Gertrude who was two years older and went for part of the evening, dressed as a tulip). She remembered other parties, however: ‘How gay were the gala evenings when the house was ablaze with lights and Willie [her younger brother] and I, crouching on hands and knees behind the balustrade of the musicians’ gallery, looked down on a festive scene below – the long dinner table covered with a damask cloth, a gold service and red roses, the lovely crystal and china, the grown-ups in their fine clothes … the ladies a-glitter with jewels seated on high-backed tapestry chairs behind which stood footmen in knee-breeches.’⁴⁰

At other moments, there were distinct disadvantages to living like a princess in a neo-Gothic palace, which, like many houses built primarily for entertaining and display, could feel gloomy and frightening when no-one else was there. The fact that the stairway was carved in Caen stone was quite irrelevant when the princess happened to be cursed with a neo-Gothic imagination. ‘I still remember how long and terrifying was that dark and endless upward sweep as, with acute sensations of fear, I climbed to my room every night, leaving below the light and its comforting rays. For in that penumbra there were spirits lurking to destroy me, hands stretched out to touch me and sighs that breathed against my cheek.’⁴¹ Life in an urban chateau had its compensations, however. On the floor beside her bedroom there was a playroom big enough for bicycling with friends. There were horse-drawn sleigh rides in the streets of New York in winter, trips to the family box at the Metropolitan Opera to hear Adelina Patti sing, and weekly classes at Dodworth’s Dancing Academy marking her out as a junior member of New York’s elect from birth.

Alva always said that she loved motherhood. She remembered a sense of religious joy when she discovered she was to have her first baby. If it ever became fashionable to decry such feelings, she wrote, she would not join in. ‘So long as the world endures there will be women who will quiver to these emotions … no matter what freedom of expression is finally attained.’⁴² Consuelo’s birth in 1877 was followed by the arrival of her brothers William Kissam II (known as Willie K. Jr) in 1878, and Harold Stirling in 1884. Alva prided herself on the fact that, unlike members of the English aristocracy, she did not hand her children over to the care of others. ‘I dedicated the best years of my life to rearing and influencing and developing those three little beings who were my links with the future. I gave them an exclusive devotion. I considered their welfare before all else. I lived in their lives and cultivated no other apart from them for myself.’⁴³

In 1909 Alva announced that she was writing a book about her child-rearing methods, and though it never materialised, she told the New York City Journal: ‘[My children] were not put away to sleep in a room with the nurse; they slept in my room. The nursery was next to my room, and when they were older they slept there, but with the door open to I could look after them, and the smallest one slept in my room. I nursed all my children, though I don’t know that anyone is particularly interested in that.’⁴⁴ By 1917, however, she had come to believe that excessive pre-occupation with her children had been misguided, and that mothers should not sacrifice themselves as she had done. ‘I want to say unhesitatingly that I believe this was wrong. I deplore the eternal sacrifice of women for another or others. Motherhood and Individuality should not conflict. Motherhood ought not to kill Personality in the mother and Personality in the mother ought not to injure the child.’⁴⁵

However much Alva enjoyed motherhood she was also ambivalent about it – largely on the grounds that many women became mothers just at the moment they were finding themselves. ‘It is a formative time for them so far as intellect goes … [A young mother is] in a sense a diamond already cut and ready to sparkle as she can find the light. Yet for the sake of developing the unknown quantity which her children are she gradually slips back into the darkness.’⁴⁶ Alva always felt that the equation between the perfect woman and virtuous female martyr was wrong. ‘The whole history of most women’s lives is summed in self-sacrifice. If it is not for a child whose future is uncertain then it is for an aged parent whose life is done. Again and again people have pointed out to me some splendid woman who was burying her talent under care for a decrepit relative. “Isn’t her life beautiful!” they would exclaim. No, it is not beautiful. I think it is disgusting. I think it is wicked,’⁴⁷ she told Sara Bard Field.

In Alva’s case, talk of immolating maternal self-sacrifice should be treated with caution. This was not modern hands-on motherhood. Like other affluent households in New York in the 1880s, 660 Fifth Avenue had nursemaids, nannies, housemaids, governesses and cooks. The fact that Consuelo’s earliest years were so unmemorable has much to do with the disciplined and dull world of an affluent nineteenth-century nursery where the emphasis was on avoiding undue stimulation, building up the infant’s strength and avoiding infection. Even when her children were very young, Alva was occupied with other matters: designing and decorating houses with Richard Morris Hunt, ensuring the Vanderbilts were behaving like Medicis, taking her rightful place at the apex of New York society, as well as the complex task of managing two large households.

There is also no sign that Alva’s personality was in any way dimmed by maternity, though as each child left the nursery she certainly exercised an increasing degree of control over its life. Alva saw a direct relationship between building houses and building children: ‘If one can judge of her own self I would unhesitatingly say that the two strongest characteristics in me are the constructive and the maternal. They are or ought to be associated.’⁴⁸ Children were, of course, the greater responsibility for here one was building character. Alva’s view of maternal responsibility was first, that the mother was directly responsible for developing the character of each child; second, that each child should be treated as an individual with an independent mind; and third, that it was the parent’s responsibility to ‘guide’ the child to the right course in life, based upon (and this was the rub) parental assessment of the child’s individual characteristics.

This view of maternal responsibility was, in many ways, an extension of the way Alva had described how she played with her dolls as a child (‘I loved dolls … I took them very seriously. I put into their china or sawdust bodies all my own feelings.’⁴⁹) She frequently expected Consuelo to behave with the submission of a doll, a ‘china body’ on to which Alva projected all her own feelings. Consuelo was to be the princess in Sleeping Beauty’s palace. ‘Gertrude and I were heiresses,’ Consuelo once told Louis Auchincloss. ‘There seemed never to have been a time when this was not made entirely clear.’⁵⁰ She was even dressed to stand apart by Alva, forced into ‘period costume’ for parties and sniggered at by other children. However, this often clashed with Alva’s other view, which she held with equal conviction, that her children should be independent-minded individuals – like her, in other words. This contradiction at the heart of her approach to child-rearing was frequently irreconcilable and posed a very difficult conundrum for her offspring, especially Consuelo. Should they please her by submitting to her as doll-children? Or would Alva be more contented if they showed signs of independence? It was often very difficult to know.

In practice, submission to Alva’s will generally took priority. It was, in any case, an age when inculcating obedience in children was widely considered a major parental responsibility, the first step in developing moral character. Childcare manuals of the period recommended that obedience training should start as early as twelve or fourteen months to encourage ‘self-control and self-denial, and advancing a step towards the mastery of [the child’s] passions’.⁵¹ If obedience was important in boys, it was essential in girls. ‘We were the last to be subjected to a harsh parental discipline,’ Consuelo wrote. ‘In my youth, children were to be seen but not heard; implicit obedience was an obligation from which one could not conscientiously escape.’⁵²

Even by the standards of the day, however, Alva was a ferocious disciplinarian, administering corporal punishment with a riding-whip for the most minor acts of delinquency. When Alva was a child, her mother’s whippings had had little effect. But a less headstrong personality like Consuelo could still feel the impact in old age. ‘Such repressive measures bred inhibitions and even now I can trace their effects,’⁵³ she wrote later. Most difficult of all, perhaps, was the stomach-knotting tension induced by a mother with a volatile and ferocious temper: ‘Her dynamic energy and her quick mind, together with her varied interests, made her a delightful companion. But the bane of her life and of those who shared it was a violent temper that, like a tempest, at times engulfed us all.’⁵⁴

While Alva certainly took time to be with her children it was not quite the unalloyed pleasure for her offspring that she seemed to imagine. ‘The hour we spent in our parents’ company after the supper we took with our governess at six can in no sense be described as the Children’s Hour,’ wrote her daughter. ‘No books or games were provided; we sat and listened to the conversation of the grown-ups and longed for the release that their departure to dress for dinner would bring.’⁵⁵ Alva lunched with her children almost every day for seventeen years, refusing (or so she later claimed) all social invitations in the middle of the day so that she could be available to her children. While she maintained that these lunches were the ‘children’s dining table’, an ‘open forum’ at which ‘everyone’s opinion was gravely received’ even when there were adult guests present, Consuelo remembered longing to express a view but invariably being repressed by a look from Mamma.

Having one’s character developed by Alva could also be a brutal experience. ‘Sitting up straight was one of the crucial tests of ladylike behaviour. A horrible instrument was devised which I had to wear when doing my lessons. It was a steel rod which ran down my spine and was strapped at my waist and over my shoulders – another strap went around my forehead to the rod. I had to hold my book high when reading, and it was almost impossible to write in so uncomfortable a position.’⁵⁶ Later, however, Consuelo attributed her famous straight back in old age to this dreadful device.

One result of Alva’s passionate involvement in her children’s upbringing was that, unlike cousin Gertrude who went to school, Consuelo was educated almost entirely at home so that Alva could oversee her doll-child’s educational curriculum. Alva wanted to educate her sons at home too but lost the battle. ‘I regretted very much the sending of my sons to preparatory schools. Personally I did not see the necessity of it. When parents have the intelligence required to guide and direct youth, I think it is better for children to stay at home as long as possible. I neither appreciate nor approve the theory held by many as to the value of outside influence in the rearing of children.’⁵⁷ In particular Alva objected to the ‘one-size-fits-all approach to education she felt had failed her badly as a child. It is likely that William K. was just as certain that only boarding school stood four square between his sons and total domination by their mother.

Consequently, Consuelo bore the brunt of Alva’s educational experiments and maternal philosophy. Alva insisted on proficiency in foreign languages, an accomplishment that was also encouraged by William K. ‘At the age of eight I could read and write in French, German and English. I learned them in that order, for we spoke French with our parents, my father having been partly educated in Geneva,’⁵⁸ wrote Consuelo. She was made to recite long poems in French and German to her parents every Saturday so that by the time she was ten she was capable of reciting ‘Les Adieux de Marie Stuart’ at a solfège class concert with such emotion that she burst into tears and was thrown a bouquet.

While instruction was given by tutors and governesses, Alva kept a very close eye on her curriculum, saying that she ‘knew the books from which [Consuelo] was being mentally fed as I knew the food that nourished her body.’⁵⁹ Alva later told the New City Journal that Consuelo often had three governesses at any one time, but ‘it was a great nuisance to have them around’.⁶⁰ At the same time, Consuelo’s education as a linguist did represent genuine encouragement of individual talent, though it was along strictly approved lines. She showed an early talent for languages and everything was done to promote it; and when she occasionally did something well enough to please Alva, the praise was worth having.

Physical independence was also encouraged. At Idle Hour, no-one could have been less like a conventional nineteenth-century mother than Alva. The children crabbed, fished and experienced a taste of the autonomy Alva enjoyed as a child, though even here she could not resist instruction. She had a pond specially constructed so that they could learn to sail and she could dispense geography lessons:

As the knowledge of navigation increased a mast and sail were added. The row boat, like a caterpillar, put on wings and became a butterfly of the water, a sail boat. With this craft and the pond we developed the Geography of the whole world. Now we were going from Dover to Calais on the choppy Channel. Now we were coming from New York to Liverpool on the perilous Ocean. William, the elder boy, by continuous exertion rocked the boat so successfully that we believed in storms and what they could accomplish for we were all pitched into the pond … no young friend who ever visited us met me at the luncheon table attired in her or his clothes.⁶¹

A governess was also pitched into this pond by the children, who promptly received one of Alva’s more memorable thrashings. In spite of her impulse to control every aspect of her children’s lives, Alva could be great fun, and courageous if things went wrong. At least once she prevented a serious accident when she jumped up and seized the bridle of a galloping pony as it bolted with Consuelo towards a water hydrant.

In a household where the children were waited on hand and foot, Alva thought it necessary to provide a play house where they could acquire some self-reliance. It was called ‘La Récréation’ and was one aspect of childhood which Alva and Consuelo later agreed had been a success. ‘The German governess and my daughter made preserves there and did a great deal of cookery. In fact, they superintended the cooking while my eldest son was the carpenter and waiter. I and my friends often went there for afternoon tea. It was prepared and served by the children and was most excellent,’⁶² wrote Alva. These hours in La Récréation gave Consuelo an early taste of the pleasure of running houses where she was in control. ‘This playhouse was an old bowling alley, and when my mother handed it over to us she insisted as a matter of training that we should do all the housework ourselves,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Utterly happy, we would cook our meal, wash the dishes and then stroll home by the river in the cool of the evening.’⁶³

The children were also given a garden where they grew flowers and vegetables which they were encouraged to take to the nearby Trinity Seaside Home for convalescent children, Alva’s first philanthropic undertaking. She told Mary Young that she started the home after watching her delicate eldest son grow into a robust boy and grasped the extent to which wealth had assisted his recovery from precarious health in infancy. Realising that poor mothers lost children because they could not afford the necessary care, Alva purchased land and built a home where convalescing children from poor homes were looked after by Protestant sisters. This was also Consuelo’s first exposure to the lives of those less fortunate than herself.

Consuelo’s nurse ‘as near a saint as it is possible for a human being to be’,⁶⁴ was another person responsible for drawing back the curtain a little further so that one of the most protected little girls in America had a glimpse of how other people lived. In conversation with a workman from Bohemia responsible for cutting the grass at Idle Hour, Consuelo discovered that he had a crippled child. Encouraged by her nurse, she loaded up her pony-cart with presents and went over to see the child, an experience which forced her to realise for the first time ‘the inequalities of human destinies with a vividness that never left me’.⁶⁵ At other times, the children sold the vegetables they grew at La Récréation to their mother in an exercise in elementary capitalism: ‘I know that they have grown up to profit by these lessons,’⁶⁶ wrote Alva. In one respect she was right. Behind her back her children gave themselves elementary lessons in gambling. ‘My brother Willie, who was of an impatient nature, would pull up the potatoes long before they were ripe,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Our earliest bets were made on the number we would find on each root.’⁶⁷

In 1885 Consuelo’s grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt, collapsed mid-conversation with an old competitor at 640 Fifth Avenue, and died. He was sixty-four. It is difficult not to feel sorry for William Henry. In addition to vilification as a result of ‘The public be damned!’ incident, he only lived to enjoy eight years of liberation from his father (or six, if one deducts the years spent attempting to settle the Commodore’s will). In the short time available he made up for years of repression. He flung down a challenge to Mrs Astor on his own account as one of the founders of the new Metropolitan Opera Company, set up by a group excluded from the Academy of Music because they were born too late to acquire a box; and he indulged a passion for horseflesh which he inherited from his father. He particularly loved trotting horses, and was often seen driving his famous trotting teams up and down Fifth Avenue. His favourites, Maud S and Aldine, broke the record for a mile at the track at Fleetwood Park in 1883. His stables for the ‘trotters’ were renowned for having gas lamps with porcelain shades, and sporting pictures on the walls.

When his new house at 640 Fifth Avenue was completed, it was clear that William Henry had finally lost all inhibition when it came to shopping. It was stuffed with enormous pieces of Renaissance furniture (in line with proto-Medici thinking), suits of armour, marble statues, bronzes, mirrors, tapestries and oriental rugs. His front doors were an exact copy of the Ghiberti bronze doors in Florence. There were Japanese rooms, early-English rooms, Grecian rooms. The walls were hung with paintings by Alma-Tadema, by Fortuny, Millet, Munkacsy, Bonheur and Bouguereau, and his great favourite, Meissonier. Those who regarded this favourably saw it as ‘regal magnificence’. Edith Wharton, on the other hand, described such Vanderbilt excess as ‘a Thermopylae of bad taste’.⁶⁸ Amidst it all, William Henry is said not to have seemed entirely at ease, boxing himself into one corner of his library in his old rocking-chair.

In William Henry’s hands the Vanderbilt fortune had continued to grow and multiply. Though assisted ably by Cornelius II and William K., as well as the Vanderbilt man of affairs Chauncey Depew, he found it hard to delegate and therefore much of the credit for this must go to him. He shepherded the railroads through a difficult period of unregulated competition, appalling accidents, organised protest at exploitative and abusive freight rates, and serious labour unrest (much of it justified). He improved Vanderbilt trains and managed to keep the Vanderbilt workforce largely on side during a violent railroad strike in 1877. As Alva put it: ‘He lacked the commanding qualities of the Commodore who had founded the family fortune, but he had a quality of genuine kindness – almost an extreme kindness and a dogged persistence and thoroughness which father had either instilled or encouraged in him and which made [it] possible for him to handle the great Rail road business left in his care.’⁶⁹

A few days after his death, William Henry Vanderbilt’s will was the source of even greater astonishment than the Commodore’s. In the short time that he had been responsible for the family fortune, dogged persistence and careful control had doubled its value from about $100 million to $200 million^**. This made him the richest man in America and the poet-statisticians of New York’s newspapers went into overdrive. In gold, the estate would weigh 500 tons and would need 500 strong horses to pull it down Wall Street; if paper, it would take a man eight hours a day for thirty days to count it. The New York Sun declared: ‘Never was such a last testament known of mortal. Kings have died with full treasuries, emperors have fled their realms with bursting coffers, great financiers have played with millions … but never before was such a spectacle presented of a plain, ordinary man dispensing of his own free will, in bulk and magnitude that the mind wholly fails to apprehend, tangible millions upon millions of palpable money. It is simply grotesque.’⁷⁰

William Henry altered his will nine times in six years, as he fretted over how best to bequeath such a legacy. He was determined to prevent the embarrassment of another will trial, and he felt strongly that the burden of such a fortune was too great for one man alone. ‘The care of $200 million is too great a load for any brain or back to bear. It is enough to kill a man. I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with the terrible burden,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘I want my sons to divide it and share the worry which it will cost to keep it.’⁷¹ At the same time, he appears to have been anxious to respect the Commodore’s wish that the family fortune should remain intact. Within his own family everyone was treated generously. His daughters were all given the houses in which they lived, and each of his eight children received $5 million with a further $40 million in trust for them jointly with arrangements made for grandchildren. Maria Kissam Vanderbilt, his widow, received 640 Fifth Avenue, its contents and an annual allowance of $200,000, as well as a bequest of $500,000 which she used to help her Kissam relatives. There were donations to Vanderbilt University and a range of smaller bequests.⁷² However, it was the two sons with the longest experience of managing the family enterprise who received the bulk of the estate between them: Cornelius II and William K. now discovered that they had inherited about $50 million each.

Because William Henry died prematurely, his sons and daughters-in-law were unexpectedly young when they inherited his fabulous wealth. Cornelius II was only forty-two, William K. was thirty-six, and Alva thirty-two. Under normal circumstances, they would all have had to wait at least another ten years before coming into such riches. But William Henry’s early demise meant that Alva and William K. could now have whatever they wanted. The consequences for Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt were even greater. She became one of the world’s greatest heiresses at the age of nine. This gave Alva plenty time to think about her daughter’s future; and this made the impact of her grandfather’s bequest on Consuelo’s life almost incalculable.

Alva and William K. immediately reacted to the unexpected improvement in their circumstances by commissioning two new accessories: their own private yacht, the Alva, and a summer cottage in the fashionable summer resort of Newport, Rhode Island, which would become the backdrop to much of the drama ahead. At first glance it seems odd that the charming and refined colonial town of Newport, expressly founded on the principle of religious tolerance during the seventeenth century, should be the locus of titanic social struggles in the Gilded Age. The town manifests something of a split personality to this day, with elegant small colonial houses nestling together round the harbour and strenuously competitive nineteenth-century palaces on the slope above scarcely conceding existence to the throng below. The explanation for its singular history lies partly in its geography: a cool summer breeze which has always attracted visitors in search of a ‘healthy climate’ and a deep natural harbour which made it accessible to steamships from the south from the early nineteenth century. It is not surprising that Alva was brought to Newport as a child by her southern parents, nor that it should have been in Newport that she first made friends with the Yznaga family who came from Cuba and Louisiana.

For much of the nineteenth century, Newport was a holiday resort for writers, artists and intellectuals of modest means. After the Civil War however, Newport fell victim to the noisy arrival of the urban rich, ‘quick to pick up the scent and take over the land, driving up prices to push out the eggheads’.⁷³ The transformation of Newport into the epicentre of social warfare at its most vicious was largely the work of two enterprising speculators: Alfred Smith and his associate Joseph Bailey. Spotting an opportunity in a manner of which Commodore Vanderbilt would have been proud, this duo acquired 140 acres of land on the slope to the north of the colonial town and began to develop terrain along Bellevue Avenue, creating large tracts of building land amid broad tree-lined streets in an informal exclusivity zone. This development paved the way for competitive snootiness unparalleled anywhere in America. In the hitherto smart resort of Saratoga, for example, society stayed and entertained in hotels, making it easier for those on its fringes to find a foothold. In Newport, on the other hand, rich families built their own ‘summer cottages’ on Smith and Bailey’s land, while those who could not afford it were kept out.⁷⁴

The summer cottages of Newport were, of course, nothing like cottages at all. Those that remain range from the elegant, to the ludicrous, to the very slightly mad. Henry James famously described them as ‘white elephants … all cry and no wool … They look queer and conscious and lumpish – some of them, as with an air of brandished proboscis, really grotesque.’⁷⁵ Several of the most famous were designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Uncle Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s house, The Breakers, had seventy rooms; the gardens of The Elms required twelve gardeners simply to keep them in order; and every Gilded Age cottage along Bellevue Avenue had a ballroom large enough to accommodate several hundred guests. This was the point of being in Newport in the first place. Even allowing for the appearance of the Casino (where one played tennis or croquet, rather than gambled) and swimming at Bailey’s Beach, the focus of activity during Newport’s short summer season was private entertaining by society figures, creating a vicious circle – or a virtuous one, depending on your point of view – of aristocratic exclusivity.

It only took the arrival of a few rich society families in Newport in the post-war years to attract others, turning Newport for a few brief weeks in July and August into New-York-by-the-Sea. By the end of the nineteenth century almost every wealthy family of the industrial age had established some kind of presence there. ‘They were the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Paran Stevenses, the Lorillards, the Oelrichses, the Belmonts, the Goelets, the Fishes, the Havemeyers, the Burdens … There were several hundred of them in Newport in any one summer season – a magical inner circle of those powerful few who called the social tune and those newly arrived families who desperately danced to it.’⁷⁶ Even for its aristocrats, Newport was anything but a holiday. For six short weeks the social competition of New York was transferred to the seaside, twisted, condensed and inflated. By 1890 the unwritten rules of competitive display required a twice-daily appearance in a phaeton on Bellevue Avenue in a different dress, a swim at private Bailey’s Beach from one’s own cabana (one of the least pleasant beaches in Newport by all accounts), luncheon on a yacht moored in the harbour, or a fête champêtre at a farm, attendance at the polo field, dinner and a further change of costume, then a ball at the Casino or, if one was of the elect, in a summer cottage on Bellevue Avenue. A season could require over ninety new dresses.⁷⁷

For the hundreds of visitors who were not part of the inner circle and who arrived in Newport each summer with the hope of breaking through, it was far, far worse. ‘It is an axiom of Newport that it takes at least four years to get in,’ wrote society author Mrs John Van Rensselaer. ‘Each season the persistent climber makes some advance through a barrage of snubs. The seasoned member of the Newport colony enters into the cruel game of quashing the pride of the stranger with great glee. Eventually, if he will bear all this, the candidate receives an invitation which indicates that he has finally been accepted by whatever particular set he has besieged. Then he turns about and snubs those remaining petitioners as harshly as he himself was snubbed. For the privilege of being a guest at certain houses and the license to affront those not yet in, he has spent perhaps a million dollars.’⁷⁸

In commissioning Richard Morris Hunt to design Marble House as her Newport summer cottage Alva accelerated Newport’s progress towards becoming the social capital of the Gilded Age. It has been remarked that the Vanderbilts only went to Newport in 1885 because of the Astors. Alva would have resented this deeply for though she undoubtedly set up camp in Newport near Mrs Astor’s house, Beechwood, and then proceeded to outshine her architecturally, she had, of course, been to Newport for holidays as a child. She was now a leader of society herself; and by 1885 she would have regarded a Newport summer ‘cottage’ of her own as a matter of entitlement. Having acquired a plot of land on Bellevue Avenue, however, she and William K. set about taking the business of aristocratisation one step further than anyone else. While Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport house, The Breakers, was modelled on the palazzo of a Medici merchant, Alva left the Medicis behind and addressed herself directly to the Bourbon monarchs of the ancien regime.

Often described as Richard Morris Hunt’s masterpiece, Marble House contained allusions to the White House and the Petit Trianon at Versailles. It was certainly not lacking in ambition. In the memoir she dictated to Matilda Young, Alva also made mention of the Acropolis. For Richard Morris Hunt it was one of the great commissions of his life: he had unlimited resources, a client whose historical imagination and ambition matched his own and who had a sense of refinement and taste far more developed than any of his other clients.

Construction of Marble House began in conditions of great secrecy in 1888. By 1889, the contractor, Charles E. Clarke of Boston, had leased a wharf and warehouse in Newport harbour for materials which were brought in by ship. Artisans imported from France and Italy were quartered in separate lodgings and banned from communicating with each other on site. High fences went up round the building plot to hide it from the gaze of curious Newporters. It would take four years to complete. As drawings in the archives of Richard Morris Hunt show, it was very much Alva’s project and she involved herself in every detail. ‘This absolutely disapproved of by Mrs Vanderbilt’ notes an anonymous hand on one drawing of a doorway. ‘This is all wrong,’ declares Alva in her own handwriting on another drawing. ‘Will send photograph of marble to be adopted and each side of mantle to be solid marble panels and no columns on this end of the room.’⁷⁹

While Marble House was under construction, the Vanderbilts kept themselves amused with their other new toy, the steam yacht Alva. Launched by Alva’s sister, Jenny Yznaga, on 14 October 1886, the yacht was 285-feet long and 32-feet wide and had a tonnage of 1,151.27, making her the largest private yacht in America by a good 35 feet, beating J. P. Morgan’s Corsair (165 feet), William Astor’s new Nourmahal (233 feet) and Jay Gould’s Atlanta (250 feet). In fact, the Alva was so large that the Turkish authorities once mistook her for a small cruiser and fired two shots across her bow in the Dardanelles. ‘Mrs Vanderbilt, who is generally credited to be a lady of excellent taste, deems that elaborate and ornate furnishings are out of place on a yacht. She thinks that she is rich enough to afford simplicity in this instance,’ reported The New York Times.⁸⁰ It was true that all the walls were simply panelled with mahogany, and the teak decks were simply covered with oriental rugs, but this principle was extended to a dining room which had a piano, a library with a fireplace, seven guest rooms, and a ten-room suite for the Vanderbilts (though the mahogany gave out below stairs in the accommodation for the crew of fifty-three).

While Alva’s mother, Phoebe Smith, had once travelled with two maids and a southern mocking bird, the Vanderbilts found it necessary to take along a crew that included a master officer, a first officer, a second officer, a boatswain and a boatswain’s mate, a storekeeper, four quartermasters, a ship’s carpenter, twelve seamen, a chief engineer, first and second assistant engineers, six firemen, three coal passers, three oilers, a donkey engineman, an electrician, an ice machine engineer, a chief steward, a ward-room steward, a firemen’s mess-man, a sailors mess-man, two mess boys, a baker and a doctor.⁸¹ (The crew total of fifty-three does not include the French chef, family friends, household servants, or tutors and governesses for the children who were frequently present.) Labour unrest was dealt with in peremptory fashion. On 4 December 1887, the ship’s log noted that men who had demanded better rates of pay and who refused to work were ‘quickly landed’. Replacements were then picked up in Constantinople. The Vanderbilts and their guests, meanwhile, not only travelled in the lap of luxury but were treated as visiting dignitaries wherever they went, greeted by consuls, admirals, ambassadors, and kings. Even the Sultan of Turkey made recompense for the shots fired across the yacht’s bows in the Dardanelles by granting William K. an audience and arranging a tour of his private palaces which included a visit to his harem; (the abject dependence of the women there would make a lifelong impression on Alva).

Cruises on the yacht between 1886 and 1890 took William K., Alva and the children to the West Indies, Europe, Turkey, North Africa and Egypt and often lasted several months. One voyage started in July 1887 and only ended on 31 March 1888, stopping at Madeira, Gibraltar and at Alexandria – where the party left the Alva and engaged one of Thomas Cook’s steam dahabiyehs, the Prince Abbas, for a trip up the Nile. Alva later remembered that while they were in Cairo, one of their regular travelling companions, Fred Beach, became the object of Baroness Vetsera’s attentions when they met her in Shepheard’s Hotel – attentions to which he showed no objection at all, but allegedly did not respond. (The following year the Baroness Vetsera would be found dead of gunshot wounds alongside her lover, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, at Mayerling.) Alva shopped for furniture for Marble House during cruises on the Alva, and on at least one occasion left the children at Nell Gwyn’s house in London while she went to look at potential purchases. On one cruise, the men of the party hunted deer at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and stalked them in Scotland where the Vanderbilts took Beaufort Castle for the shooting season. Its owner, Lord Lovat, died while they were in residence and they witnessed a Highland funeral. This added to the general gloom of the experience, which Alva never wished to repeat: ‘I always found the climate very trying in Scotland, and caring nothing for sport, found little to do there of interest.’⁸²

The benefits of this style of international travel were not always clear to Consuelo. Extended cruising put paid to any chance of conventional schooling and it isolated Consuelo from the company of children her own age for months at a time. Life on the largest private yacht in America could be dull for a child, due in part to Alva’s relentless emphasis on improvement. ‘Heavy seas provided our only escape from the curriculum of work,’ Consuelo wrote later, ‘for even sightseeing on our visits ashore became part of our education, and we were expected to write an account of all we had seen’.⁸³ In spite of her magnificence, Alva was not a particularly seaworthy boat. There were extended bouts of seasickness (noted in the ship’s log when they moored off Burntisland in Scotland in 7 August 1887), and life at sea could sometimes be positively frightening. ‘Ship rolling a great deal and shipping quantities of water, which found its way below … Both large tables in forward and after saloons carried away,’⁸⁴ read an entry in the ship’s log of an early cruise. During one storm an idiotic tutor maintained that it would only take seven huge waves in succession to sink the boat. ‘Willie and I spent the rest of the day counting the waves in terrorised apprehension as the green water deepened on our deck,’⁸⁵ recalled Consuelo.

The cruises often ended in Nice, and the party travelled to Paris, where the Vanderbilts spent May and June with their retinue. As a child Consuelo fell in love with Paris just as Alva had done. Here she could ride on the carousel, watch Punch and Judy on the Champs Elysées and sail her toy boat in the gardens of the Tuileries. Like her mother, Consuelo came to associate Paris with liberation. After months on the yacht she could play with friends from New York on the same international circuit – Waldorf Astor who would marry Nancy Langhorne, May Goelet who would be her bridesmaid and later marry the Duke of Roxburghe, and Katherine Duer, later Mrs Clarence Mackay, already demonstrating that she had a bossy streak. ‘She was always the queen in the games we played, and if anyone was bold enough to suggest it was my turn she would parry “Consuelo does not want to be Queen” and she was right,’⁸⁶ wrote Consuelo later. For several years in succession the early summer months were spent in Paris, followed by a brief return to New York; Newport in June and July; and a few weeks at Idle Hour in the early autumn before returning to New York for the confined world of the winter season.

When Consuelo reached her mid-teens, Alva finally allowed her to attend ‘Rosa classes’ when they were in New York. These were classes given by a Mr Rosa to a group of six young ladies in the home of one of the pupils – in Consuelo’s case, the classes took place at the house of Mrs Frederick Bronson on Madison Avenue and 38th Street. Blanche Oelrichs attended the Rosa classes a year or two after Consuelo, and remembered Mr Rosa as ‘a very stylish gentleman, with sideburns and a heavy watch chain, whose ambition to die in Rome was eventually gratified’.⁸⁷ The classes lasted from eleven till one while Mr Rosa fought to cram in as much English, Latin, mathematics and science as he possibly could. Consuelo preferred studying English and history and kept her early essays for Mr Rosa on the Punic Wars until she died. Two hours each morning with Mr Rosa were followed by French, German and music lessons with governesses, and an hour of exercise in Central Park.

None of this meant that Consuelo was gradually permitted greater independence. Instead, such freedom as she had enjoyed as a child was steadily curtailed in her teens, and gave way to a life that was increasingly controlled and introspective. Her brothers became more distant as they went away to boarding school and as she grew older she was forbidden to join in with their holiday activities. By the time Consuelo was sixteen there were ‘finishing governesses’ in residence, one French and one English. Since French and English views about finishing young ladies were sharply divergent if not contradictory (and probably still are), these governesses had to be handled with great tact. Alva spent many hours in the schoolroom supervising the curriculum and directing the finishing governesses. Unable to resist a competition, she sent off for the entrance papers to Oxford University and ‘found that so far as [Consuelo’s] equipment went she could enter with a condition in three live languages and one dead one’.⁸⁸

Even by the standards of the day, Consuelo’s teenage life was highly managed. It is striking that cousin Gertrude Vanderbilt was permitted far more independence, in spite of the fact that Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Alice were serious and strict. Gertrude’s teenage diaries are filled with accounts of close female friendships, sorrow at leaving school, upsets about being too young to take part in ‘tableaux’, quarrels with her best friend and making-up. As Gertrude and her cousin Adele Sloane emerged from the schoolroom and into society, they were encouraged to form views about young men in the circle of aristocratic families in which they moved. Gertrude came home and analysed some of them: ‘You have not enough go. You are trustworthy without being interesting.’ [Mo Taylor]. ‘If anyone ever looked out for No. 1, you are that person.’ [Richard Wilson], ‘You mean well by people, but you will not take very much trouble to make yourself agreeable.’ [Lewis Rutherfurd].⁸⁹ Adele was even allowed to go out riding with some young gentlemen, though she was never permitted to be alone with a man indoors (‘Had nobody in the older generation read Madame Bovary?’ asks Louis Auchincloss in astonishment.⁹⁰)

Alva would allow none of this. ‘My mother disapproved of what she termed silly boy and girl flirtations … and my governess had strict injunctions to report any flighty disturbance of my thoughts.’⁹¹ There were moments when the doll-child found such micro-management truly insulting: ‘I remember once objecting to her taste in the clothes she selected for me. With a harshness hardly warranted by so innocent an observation, she informed that I had no taste and that my opinions were not worth listening to. She brooked no contradiction, and when once I replied, “I thought I was doing right,” she stated, “I don’t ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told”.’⁹²

In America in the 1890s there were many constraints on the lives of well-to-do young ladies: few telephones, no motor cars, corsets, long skirts, hats fixed with pins, gloves and blouses with high whalebone collars. Even at Bailey’s Beach at Newport, Consuelo bobbed up and down in the water in an outfit of dark blue alpaca wool consisting of a dress, drawers, stockings and a hat. It is perhaps not surprising that almost two pages of her memoirs are given over to a long list of the books she read in French, German and English. One German governess in her teens particularly inspired her with a love of German poetry and philosophy – to such an extent that after her marriage Consuelo considered translating Also Sprach Zarathustra into English, only to discover that there were twenty-seven translations already in existence. Meanwhile, she was inspired to secret but short-lived experiments in austerity by Plutarch’s Lives (she spent a night on the floor, but caught a cold) and reached a ‘real emotional crisis’ when she found a copy of Mill on The Floss in the yacht’s library. The picture Consuelo paints of herself as a somewhat sensitive, solitary and rather bookish teenager is reinforced by an entry in the diaries of the household superintendent, William Gilmour. On Thursday 2 March 1893, he wrote: ‘Miss Vanderbilt’s birthday, 16 years old. I went down to Wintons [Huttons] 23 St this morning and bought 3 vols Keats poems for Willie’s present to his sister.’⁹³

For many years, the marriage of Alva and William K. Vanderbilt had been propelled by shared ambition. They had conquered New York society together, paving the way for other Vanderbilts, particularly Cornelius II and Alice, to take their place at the apex of New York society. By the mid-1880s, William K. and Cornelius II were members of all the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs. Between them, the Vanderbilts had a row of magnificent houses on Fifth Avenue. Alva had undermined Mrs Astor’s monopoly to such an extent that it had become a newspaper joke to talk about the ‘Astorbilts’. Alva made her mark on New York’s architectural history too, forging an important creative link with its greatest architect, Richard Morris Hunt. But these achievements came at great emotional expense. Even by 1885, when William Henry’s death made the William K. Vanderbilts one of the richest couples in America, the glue of shared ambition had dried out. Consuelo’s sixteenth birthday in 1892 may have been celebrated with a thoughtful present from her brother; but the next two years would be deeply scarred by the unhappiness already engulfing her parents.

^* approximately $13.9 billion today

^** approximately $20.7 billion today